Modeling as Theater and Other Questionable Research Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Nested political, environmental, and epistemic crises call for radical solidarity across science and nonscientific disciplines. Given disparate disciplinary histories and epistemic frameworks, how should theater and performance scholars “stand with science”? Outlining the shortcomings of a reliance on defensive scientism as a response to external threat, this article develops a “protheatrical framework” for collaborating on problems of methods reform. Theorizing research as theater (RaT), the author reviews different epistemes of repetition that inhere in qualitative and humanistic research versus experimental scientific research. She then turns to a cluster of critical perspectives on mainstream research reform that share a common motivation to protect and cultivate possibility for “another science.” As an alternative to procedural reforms that narrow what counts as science, these critical metascientists mobilize modeling as theater as a practice to cultivate epistemic pluralism. Their mobilization of modeling in the methods reform debate exemplifies principles from experimental theater, in particular its emphases on process, reflexivity, and open-ended iteration that blurs boundaries between audience and performer. By activating improvisational capacities like working with uncertainty, using what one has on hand, and “yes, and,” the author argues that modeling as theater is a practice for staying epistemically open, humble, and responsive. It can serve as a training space for interdisciplinary collaborations that strengthen knowledge ecologies in the face of internal and external crises.